How To Use Your Eyes
In How to Use Your Eyes, James Elkins explores the idea of not just seeing a thing, but also seeing all the other things (people, objects, events) that are connected to it either through its history or through its current use. Chapters Preface In the preface, Elkins relates his rationale for including chapters on certain objects. According to Elkins, it is often simple, overlooked things that we can learn the most about by just looking at them more closely. How to Look at a Postage Stamp In this chapter, Elkins examines the details of a few of the earliest postage stamps and compares them to other stamps throughout history. Elkins maintains that stamps were originally designed with a fierce sense of nationalism, primarily illuminating this claim with the first postage stamp, ‘Penny Black,’ and the homage it pays to the Queen of England; he also considers stamps manufactured in Ireland following the nation’s independence. The professor goes on to lament the fact that modern stamps are hardly made with the same amount of care and attention to detail that these older stamps were. Although older stamps sometimes made the mistake of borrowing too heavily from other art forms (such as paintings or medallions) and ended up looking rather silly, Elkins points to the subtle details in said stamps–everything from shading to the amount of lines and how finely transcribed they are–that reflect greater artistic value than their cheaply produced contemporaries. In Elkins’ eyes, the devotion to the craft of stamp-making and the resulting elegance of the products that come out of it is far more apparent in the carefully concocted creations of craftsmen of the prior era. Example in Elkins' Style My water bottle sits on my desk next to me as it has nearly everyday for the last two years and yet, as Elkins discovers with his exploration of grass, if not for being tasked with the bottle’s study, I may have never paid it much heed. It is a simple, lightly adorned, utilitarian device, not nearly as flashy as the half dozen or so electronic devices that accompany it on the desk. The bottle itself is a soft, squeezable plastic that, while translucent, is also hazy white in color distorting the image of anything behind it. The top is made of harder plastic of which the base is a speckled gray, the nozzle a pure white, and the cap a clear smoky gray. The inside of the nozzle is becoming slightly discolored again (it’s probably time to wash it) and there is a faint line around the inside of the bottle indicating where the water once sat undisturbed for too long. The manufacturer’s logo, Nalgene, is printed in blue on the front of the bottle while “Made in U.S.A.” is proudly displayed below. On the back, in the same blue ink, are markings to gauge the current volume of water inside in both milliliters and fluid ounces allowing the bottle to double as a measuring cup. It is here perhaps that Elkins would pause to begin unraveling the deeper story of this water bottle, for why would one need a water bottle to be any more than just a water bottle? I actually bought this bottle over fifteen years ago for use on a backpacking trip in Colorado, where the added weight of a measuring cup would be undesirable. Since then it has been with me on two additional backpacking excursions to New Mexico and Virginia, a week spent canoeing in Canada, and more recently a vacation with my extended family to visit our distant relatives in Slovenia. It has only been in the last two years (when I grew tired of knocking over open glasses of water) that I rediscovered and re-purposed the venerable water bottle to sit humbly on my desk. Sources ''In Your Eyes ''preface: https://wamsummer2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/2015-elkins-1.pdf ''In Your Eyes ''chapter 1: https://wamsummer2015.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/2015-elkins.pdf